Fuzzy ant colony optimization for estimating chlorophyll concentration profile in offshore sea water.

The determination of some inherent optical properties can be addressed by estimating the ocean chlorophyll concentration, if bio-optical models can be applied - such as for the offshore sea water. This inverse problem can be formulated as an optimization problem and iteratively solved, where the radiative transfer equation is the direct model. An objective function is given by the square difference between computed and in situ experimental radiances at every iteration. In the standard ant colony optimization (ACO), the pheromone is reinforced only on the best ant of the population. The fuzzy strategy consists in including additional pheromone quantity on the best ant, but a small pheromone quantity is also spread over the other solutions close to the best one. Test results show that the fuzzy-ACO produces better inverse solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]